A New TREAT Asia Database Examines Broader Treatment Trends

 
Dr. Matthew Law presents TAHOD-LITE data to TREAT Asia network members during the 2014 network meeting.

The TREAT Asia HIV Observational Database (TAHOD) provides detailed information about over 8,000 HIV-positive adult patients in care at 21 TREAT Asia network sites across the Asia-Pacific. However, while it continues to be an essential resource for assessing treatment outcomes in Asian populations, TAHOD’s model of in-depth data collection limits the size of the cohort to a subset of those living with HIV who are cared for at these clinics. This year, TREAT Asia launched a new database called TAHOD-LITE that will include more basic data, but from a much larger proportion of the HIV-positive patients seen at participating sites.

“In contrast to TAHOD, which includes a detailed dataset for a smaller number of patients, TAHOD-LITE collects fewer core variables for many more patients,” says Dr. Nicolas Durier, TREAT Asia director of research. “This will markedly increase our power to run certain key analyses on HIV care and treatment outcomes on a programmatic level.” While this type of surveillance analysis of patients living with HIV has occurred in other regions, it is new for the Asia-Pacific.

Eight participating TREAT Asia sites in Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Singapore, and Vietnam have contributed data from over 34,000 patients seen between 1997 and 2013, and more sites have expressed interest in joining. “We saw a growing need for these types of surveillance analyses,” says Dr. Matthew Law, head of the Biostatistics and Databases Program at the Kirby Institute, UNSW Australia, which is leading the TAHOD-LITE data analyses. “It will allow us to keep an eye on things like how many patients are lost to care early on or what is the rate of switching from first-line ART, which will help predict the likely needs of patients into the future.” Other analyses will include examining patients’ CD4 levels, which reflect immune status, at the time they start treatment.

The research team plans to have the first formal analysis of the data completed in early 2015, and to make it available through public online reports.